Hello, I trust you’re doing well. You know, I’m in Krakow, Poland. It’s an interesting environment as such.
I’m staying at the family home of my old friend from university days, some 50 years ago. We’ve been friends, gosh, ever since, through marriage, children and through life itself.
And the key factor to life, I think, is basically choice, the choice that I make. And I must be responsible for my choices, because we live in a world today, I think, that it’s very, very easy to say that I’m the victim.
I don’t really have a choice, because perhaps my skin color is a certain color, or perhaps my culture, my social station in life when I’m born, etc. I have no choice. But that’s not true, is it?
And Auschwitz, I think, is a classic example. Where it thousands, hundreds of thousands, one estimate is over a million. At the very end of the war, the commandant claimed there was up to six million actually were killed there.
But I think studies now have shown slightly over a million people died, if you can imagine. And an interesting man that I often refer to is a man called Viktor Frankl. He was arrested, I believe, in 41, 42.
He was arrested along with his pregnant wife, his brother, his sister-in-law, and his mother and his father-in-law, taken to Auschwitz, along with several other camps along the way. After the war, he was the only one who survived.
His wife, unfortunately, had died, and his brother, sister-in-law, his mother and father, everybody was dead but him. And he relates a story in his book, Man Search for Meaning, that, I mean, these are all intellectuals and probably out of shape.
They’re not training at the gym all the time. So he’s walking this one day with a group of professors, and he had this moment. I mean, things are tough.
It’s winter time, he’s wearing very poor clothing, it’s cold, and most people are going to die. Most did die, actually.
But he realized at that point, the thing you could not take away from me, from me, in my life, is the power to choose my thoughts at this moment. However horrible the circumstances are, and obviously he’s an extreme, isn’t he?
Because, I mean, gosh, most people died, and he was fortunate, and he didn’t. But this concept of choice, I really think is a concept that should come to everyone’s life.
Because when you wake up, when you actually gain consciousness, at around 20 or so, you start to realize that, my God, I don’t know where I’m going to go with this thing called life, my piece of life.
And you realize that you’re a man, a woman, certain socioeconomic status, you know, your color, et cetera. And then in your nakedness, it’s up to me.
It’s up to me to get an education, then after an education, to meet the right person, God willing, perhaps get married, family, all these choices, but these are choices that I make. And I must accept the choices that I make.
Many times, I make them in error. In my own life, I’ve made many errors, but the secret, once again, no regrets. No regrets.
The mistakes that you have made, and I have made many, are your responsibility. And you have to learn from these mistakes, or not, or not. Many individuals never learn, and they suffer.
I was watching a video clip this morning of a man who apparently helps billionaires. He consults with billionaires, and he says that the majority of billionaires that he’s met in his life, most are not happy. What?
Most are what? Most are not happy because they’re not at peace. You think to yourself, with a billion dollars or more, you think you would be at peace.
But he claims, and I’ve also read, that many wealthy people are not happy because they’re not at peace. Because peace is a choice, isn’t it? It is a choice.
And if you’re pursuing something like money, I mean, money is power to a lot of people, it’s freedom to others, but if you don’t know what to do with your money, it’s inevitably pointless, isn’t it?
Because you can have a successful business and you can make a lot of money, but that does not mean that you are going to lead a successful inner life. Externally, you could have the rings and things and things that wealthy people have, right?
But gosh, it doesn’t mean that you’re contented in your life. So how am I going to get on this path of contentment? But I think the very first thing most people say is you got to be honest.
I got to be honest with me, what I really want to do, not what my parents want me to do or my friends want me to do, perhaps even the society wants to do, is what I want to do. So I got to be honest with myself.
And in turn, with great respect, I got to be honest with, of course, others as well, right? And I don’t mean to be hurtful because I don’t think that’s necessary, but you got to somehow confess the reality as you see it to other people.
Then you’ve got to somehow find why I am here. What is my mission in life? And the only way you’re going to do this, I believe, is through profound introspection and an analysis of who you are, right?
Individuation, I believe Carl Jung calls it, right? You got to step down into the darkness of you. And I think in a bizarre way, we’re supposed to have a dark side because by having a dark side, I really begin to believe in this concept of free will.
I have a choice to be the kind of man or woman I want to become. And yes, in the modern era, life is hard, for sure is hard. And I would be honest, it was hard for me, but not that hard when it came to the economic side, right?
I was able to get a job, make some money, all of those things.
But that kind of fools you as well because very quickly you have, especially if you’re a working class man, very quickly you have a lot of money, at least you did 50 years ago, but you didn’t have intellectual growth. Your friends were quite crude.
They told crude jokes about life, women. It didn’t matter, right? So you realize very quickly you couldn’t stay here.
But the next step, at least in my case, was to get an education. And getting a formal education at the time to get into the school was relatively simple.
But to finish, my gosh, most people, I mean, 90% didn’t, during this era, one in ten finished in four years for a bachelor’s degree. Most clicked, because the money was too good. So you’ve got to be honest.
You’ve got to find your mission. And then I think you have to be willing to work. Truly to work.
Work on your income, your career, but also work on the inner side of you, right? Got to. Gotta be willing to take that chance on you, right?
And why not? Whatever frame that the universe has given you, be it me, if you’re a man or a woman, ethnicity, I’ve said earlier, socioeconomic income at the beginning, those are givens. Now let’s get to work on the real me, on the real me.
I was relating today to my friend Stash, that when I was about 30 or 40 years old, I was actually in a flotation tank.
And that’s a large tank of water that they put salt in, and it was heated, so it was relatively warm. You take all your clothes off, you get inside, and because of the salt, you just float.
And then they close the door, and it’s totally black, totally black. So you’re floating virtually in suspended space, animation, if you will.
And initially, I could feel that hair on the side of my arm, and then it dissipated, and it was only me and my thoughts. And for a quick moment, I felt body-less. There was no corporeal me at all, right?
It was just my thoughts in my mind. And I’ve often read that people that actually die and come back, these near-death experiences, true or not, have a similar sort of visualization, if you will, and it changes their lives. And why does it do that?
Because you realize you are part of a continuum. Maybe the ego doesn’t transit, maybe there is no Leon when he’s physically dead, but the essence of Leon ends up in some space, some place, and it’s greatly comforting, I think, to most people, right?
So just to leave you with these thoughts, ultimately, that I gotta own what I decide, my decisions, right? These are my own. I’m in control of my innermost thoughts.
They’re not external, right? They’re not. They’re inside of me, and in that sense, no one can take my inner thoughts away.
My external being, I can be in a horrible situation like Dr. Frankl was for those four or five years. Great loss because of it.
But out of that, he helped a lot of people with his philosophy of global therapy, right? And he says, and I think there’s some truth to this. Freud talks about the basis of reality has to do with our sexuality.
Nietzsche, Adler, people like this say that no, no, the mission of life is power. He says, no, no, it’s meaning. God find my meaning.
And a big part of that is making my own choices. So you take care and you know what they say. You know what they say.
Critical thinking is everything, especially when you’re going to make, he’s given choices in life and critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care. God bless.
Bye bye.